My phone died in the queue at a hardware shop once. I sat an hour and a half on the bench at the bus stop outside, with a tin of green paint, and my hand went looking for the phone eleven times. The hand didn't know.
What follows is about that reach, the dead battery, and the afternoon that turns up when the screen stays dark. Nobody here is throwing a phone in a lake.
My phone died in a shop queue and I kept checking it, eleven times before the bus came. I wasn't checking for anything. A dead phone hands the afternoon back.
A letter to my phone. I reach for it in the gentle morning hours, not because I need it but because it trained me to. Not a breakup, just a little distance.